Turner Part 3

CHAPTER V.

THE LIBER STUDIORUM--HIS POETRY AND DRAGONS.

In 1807 Turner commenced his most serious rivalry, "The Liber Studiorum," a rivalry which not only exceeded in force but differed in quality from his others. Previously he had pitted his skill only against that of the artist rivalled, adopting the style of his rival, but in these engravings he pitted not only his skill, but also his style and range of art against Claude's. There are indeed only a few of the "Liber" prints which are in Claude's style, and most of the best are in his own. Lovely as are _Woman Playing Tambourine_, and _Hindoo Devotions_, they seem to us far lower in value than _Mount St. Gothard_ and _Hind Head Hill_. There is the usual mixture of feeling in the motives with which Turner undertook this work, the same dependence on others for the starting impulse which we see throughout his art-life, the same originality, industry, and confusion of thought in carrying out his design. The idea of the "Liber" did not originate with him, but with his friend Mr. W. F. Wells. The idea was n.o.ble in so far as it attempted to extend the bounds of landscape art beyond previous limits, to break down the Claude worship which blinded the eyes of the public to the merit that existed in contemporary work, and prevented them, and artists also, from looking to nature as the source of landscape art. It is scarcely too much to say that in those days Claude stood between nature and the artist, and that he was as much the standard of landscape art as Pheidias of sculpture. To try to clear away this barrier of progress, as Hogarth had striven years before to abolish the "black masters," was no ign.o.ble effort, and it was done in a n.o.bler spirit than that of Hogarth, for he did not attempt to depreciate his rival. Yet the n.o.bility of the attempt was not unmixed, for if he did not disparage Claude, he attempted to make himself famous at Claude's expense. He did not indeed say, as Hogarth would have done, "Claude is bad, I am good;" but he said, "Claude is good, but I am better." His own experience even from very early days should have told him that, despite the cant of connoisseurs and the strength of old traditions, no purely original work of his had pa.s.sed unnoticed, and that the truest and n.o.blest way of educating the public taste was by following the bent of his original genius, and leaving the public to draw their own comparisons.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE.

_From the "Liber Studiorum."_]

Mr. Wells's daughter states that not only did the "Liber Studiorum"

entirely owe its existence to her father's persuasion, but the divisions into "Pastoral," "Elegant Pastoral," "Marine," &c., were also suggested by him. Turner determined to print and publish and sell the "Liber"

himself, but to employ an engraver. His first choice fell on "Mr. F. C.

Lewis, the best aquatint engraver of the day, who at the very time was at work on facsimiles of Claude's drawings."[23] With him he soon quarrelled. The terms were, that Turner was to etch and Lewis to aquatint at five guineas a plate. The first plate, _Bridge and Goats_, was finished and accepted by Turner, though not published till April, 1812; but the second plate Turner gave Lewis the option of etching as well as aquatinting, and he etched it accordingly, and sent a proof to Turner, raising his charge from five guineas to eight, in consideration of the extra work. Turner praised it, but declined to have the plate engraved, on the ground that Lewis had raised his charges. This ended Mr. Lewis's connection with the "Liber," and Turner next employed Mr.

Charles Turner, the mezzotint engraver, but he had to pay him eight guineas a plate. Charles Turner agreed to engrave fifty plates at this price, but after he had finished twenty, he wished to raise his charge to ten guineas, which led to a quarrel. With reference to these quarrels of Turner with his engravers, Mr. Thornbury says, "The painter who had never had quarter given to him when he was struggling, now in his turn, I grieve to say, gave no quarter," and "inflexibly exacting as he was, Turner could not understand how an engraver who had contracted to do fifty engravings should try to get off his bargain at the twenty-first."

This, like most of Thornbury's statements, is utterly untrustworthy.

There is no evidence to show that a hard bargain was ever driven with him when he was struggling, there is no word of any dispute with engravers till he began to employ them himself, and as to his "not being able to understand" how any man should endeavour to obtain more than the price contracted for, it was exactly what he tried to do himself, when afterwards employed by Cooke.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ALPS AT DAYBREAK.

_From Rogers's "Poems."_]

The fact is that in all business arrangements Turner's worse nature, the mean, grasping spirit of the little tradesman, was brought into prominence. In the case of Lewis he was evidently in the wrong, in the case of Charles Turner he was only hard; but in all business transactions he was as a rule ungenerous, and sometimes dishonest. His action towards the public with regard to the "Liber" can be called by no other name. His prices at first were fifteen shillings for prints, and twenty-five shillings for proofs. When the plates got worn (and mezzotint plates are subject to rapid deterioration in the light parts), Turner used to alter them, sometimes changing the effect greatly, as in the _Mer de Glace_, where he transformed the smooth, snow-covered glacier into spiky ridges of ice, or in the _aesacus_ and _Hesperie_, where the effect of sunbeams through the wood was effaced, and the direction in which the head of Hesperie was looking was changed, and the face afterwards concealed. The changes were not always for the worse; the very wear of the plate in some cases, as in that of the _Calm_, improved the effect, and what we have called his confusion of thought, and what Thornbury has called his "distorted logic," may have led him to believe that he was not wrong in selling as he did these worn and altered plates as proofs. A kind casuistry may lend us a word less disagreeable than dishonest to such transactions, but when we know that he habitually from the first made no distinction between proofs and prints--that he sold the same things under different names at different prices--every plea breaks down, and we are forced to the conclusion that when he thought he could cheat safely "the pack of geese,"[24] as he thought the public, he did so.

Nor can we acquit Turner of unfairness in issuing the "Liber Studiorum"

in compet.i.tion with the French painter's "Liber Veritatis," a book well-known to the public and to him, as the third edition of its plates, engraved by Earlom, was just issued, when the "Liber Studiorum" was begun. He must have known what the public did not probably know--that Claude's rough sketches were mere memoranda of the effects of his pictures taken by him to identify them, and never meant for publication; whereas his were carefully-finished compositions, into which he threw his whole power. Not only was the publication unfair as regards Claude, but it was misleading to the public as regards himself. The t.i.tle, "Liber Studiorum," applies only to some of the prints. A few of the poorer plates, especially the architectural ones, and such simple designs as the _Hedging and Ditching_, might properly perhaps have been called studies, but even upon these he bestowed a care and a finish that would ent.i.tle them to be called pictures, monochrome as they are.

The want of a well-considered plan, and the capricious way in which they were published, contributed to the ill-success of the work; and though we are accustomed to look upon its failure as a severe judgment on the taste of the time, we are not at all sure that it would have succeeded if published in the present day, unless Mr. Ruskin had written the advertis.e.m.e.nt.

"The meaning of the entire book," according to that eloquent writer, "was symbolized in the frontispiece,[25] which he engraved with his own hand:[26] Tyre at Sunset, with the Rape of Europa, indicating the symbolism of the decay of Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty pa.s.sing away into terror and judgment (Europa being the Mother of Minos and Rhadamanthus)."

Turner's advertis.e.m.e.nt thus describes the intention of the work:--

"Intended as an ill.u.s.tration of Landscape Composition, cla.s.sed as follows: Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural."

We think Turner's description the more correct, and that the intention of his frontispiece was to give all the "cla.s.ses" in one composition, and we are extremely doubtful whether Turner knew or cared anything about either Minos or Rhadamanthus.

The most obvious intention of the work was to show his own power, and there never was, and perhaps never will be again, such an exhibition of genius in the same direction. No rhetoric can say for it as much as it says for itself in those ninety plates, twenty of which were never published. If he did not exhaust art or nature, he may be fairly said to have exhausted all that was then known of landscape art, and to have gone further than any one else in the interpretation of nature.

Notwithstanding, the merit of the plates is very unequal, some, as _Solway Moss_ and the _Little Devil's Bridge_, being more valuable as works of art than many of his large pictures; others, especially the architectural subjects, the _Interior of a Church_, and _Pembury Mill_, being almost devoid of interest. As to any one thought running through the series, we can see none, except desire to show the whole range of his power; and as to sentiment, it seems to us to be thoroughly impersonal, impartial, and artistic. He turns on the pastoral or historical stop as easily as if he were playing the organ, and his only concern with his figures is that they shall perform their parts adequately, which is as much as some of them do.

We have spoken of the book as an attack on Claude, and of the "intention" of the work, but we are not sure that we are not using too definite ideas to express the variety of impulses in Turner's mind that tended to the commencement of the "Liber." We have seen that the first notion of it, and its divisions, were suggested by Mr. Wells, and the plates are nothing more nor less than a selection from his sketches and pictures, arranged under these heads. His early topographical drawings and studies in England provided him with the architectural and pastoral subjects, his studies of Claude and the Poussins and Wilson, with the elegant pastoral, Vandevelde and nature with the marine, and his one or two visits to the Continent with the mountainous. The frontispiece, the first attempt to give a coherent signification to the whole, was not published till 1812, and it was not till 1816 that the advertis.e.m.e.nt to which we have called attention appeared when, after four years'

intermission, the issue of the "Liber" was recommenced; even then it is only described as "an ill.u.s.tration of Landscape Composition;" and it is quite probable that the desire to make money, to display his art, to rival Claude, and to educate the public, contributed to the production of the work, without any very vivid consciousness on his part as to his motives of action. It has, like all Turner's work, the characteristics of a gradual growth rather than of the carrying out of a well-defined conception.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FALLS IN VALOMBRe.

_From Rogers's "Jacqueline."_]

There is one way in which the t.i.tle of the book may be considered as appropriate, and that is to take "studia" to mean "studies," in the usual general sense of the word, for it is an index to his whole course of study (including books and excepting colour), down to the time of its publication. With the exception of his Venetian pictures and his later extravagances, it may be said to be an epitome of his art without colour. Poets and painters may change their style, and may develop their powers in after-life in an unexpected manner; but after the age at which Turner had arrived when he commenced to publish the "Liber," viz., thirty-two, there are few, if any, mental germs which have not at least sprouted. Turner, though he never left off acquiring knowledge, or developing his style, is no exception to this rule, and this makes the "Liber" valuable, not only as a collection of works of art, but as a nearly complete summary of the great artist's work and mind. Amongst his more obvious claims to the first place among landscape artists, are his power of rendering atmospherical effects, and the structure and growth of things. He not only knew how a tree looked, but he showed how it grew. Others may have drawn foliage with more habitual fidelity, but none ever drew trunks and branches with such knowledge of their inner life; if you look at the trunks in the drawing of _Hornby Castle_ for instance (which we mention because it is easily seen at the South Kensington Museum), and compare them with any others in the same room, the superior indication of texture of bark, of truly varied swelling, of consistency, and all essential differences between living wood and other things, cannot fail to be apparent to the least observant. Although the trees of the "Liber" are not of equal merit (Mr. Ruskin says the firs are not good), this quality may be observed in many of the plates.

Others have drawn the appearance of clouds, but Turner knew how they formed. Others have drawn rocks, but he could give their structure, consistency, and quality of surface, with a few deft lines and a wash; others could hide things in a mist, but he could reveal things through mist. Others could make something like a rainbow, but he, almost alone, and without colour, could show it standing out, a bow of light arrested by vapour in mid-air, not flat upon a mountain, or printed on a cloud.

If all his power over atmospheric effects and all his knowledge of structure are not contained in the "Liber," there is sufficient proof of them scattered through its plates to do as much justice to them as black and white will allow. If we want to know the result of his studies of architecture we see it here also, little knowledge or care of buildings for their own sakes, but perfect sense of their value pictorially for breaking of lights and casting of shadows; for contrast with the undefined beauty of natural forms, and for ma.s.ses in composition; for the sentiment that ruins lend, and for the names which they give to pictures. If we seek the books from which his imagination took fire, we have the Bible and Ovid, the first of small, the latter of great and almost solitary power. Jason daring the huge glittering serpent, Syrinx fleeing from Pan, Cephalus and Procris, aesacus and Hesperie, Glaucus and Scylla, Narcissus and Echo; if we want to know the artists he most admired and imitated, or the places to which he had been, we shall find easily nearly all the former, and sufficient of the latter to show the wide range of his travel. In a word, one who has carefully studied the "Liber" had indeed little to learn of the range and power of Turner's art and mind, except his colour and his fatalism.

The first quotation from the "Fallacies of Hope," nevertheless, was published in the catalogue of 1812, as the motto of his picture of _Snowstorm--Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps_, and it is probable that the ill-success of the "Liber" contributed not a little to the gloomy habit of mind which breathes through the fragments of this unfinished composition. These were the lines appended to that grand picture:--

"Craft, treachery, and fraud--Sala.s.sian force Hung on the fainting rear! then Plunder seiz'd The victor and the captive--Saguntum's spoil, Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc'd, Look'd on the sun with hope;--low, broad, and wan.

While the fierce archer of the downward year Stains Italy's blanch'd barrier with storms.

In vain each pa.s.s, ensanguin'd deep with dead, Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll'd.

Still on Campania's fertile plains--he thought But the loud breeze sob'd, Capua's joys beware."

This is nearer to poetry than Turner ever got again. The picture is well-known, and was suggested partly by a storm observed at Farnley, partly by a picture by J. Cozens,[27] of the same subject, from which Turner is reported to have said that he learnt more than from any other.

Turner's love of poetry was shown from the first possible moment. The first pictures to which he appended poetical mottoes were those of 1798, but he could not have used them before, as quotations were never published in the Academy Catalogue prior to that year. When his first original verses were published we cannot tell, but there is little doubt that the lines to his _Apollo and the Python_, in the Catalogue of 1811, were of his own fabrication. They are not from Callimachus, as a.s.serted in the catalogue, but a jumble of the descriptions of two of Ovid's dragons, the Python, and Cadmus's tremendous worm, and are just the peculiar mixture of Ovid, Milton, Thomson, Pope, and the quotations in Royal Academy Catalogues, out of which he formed his poetical style.

The Turneresque style of poetry is in fact formed very much in the same way as the Turneresque style of landscape, but the result is not so satisfactory. It required a totally different kind of brain machinery from that which Turner possessed. He may have had a good ear for the music of tones, for he used to play the flute, but he had none for the music of words. Coleridge was an instance of how distinct these two faculties are, as he, whose verses exceed almost all other English verses in beauty of sound, could not tell one note of music from another. Turner lived in a world of light and colour, and beautiful changeful indefinite forms; his thought had visions in place of words; his mind communed with itself in sights and symbols; the procession of his ideas was a panorama. So, where a poet would jot down lines and thoughts, he would print off the impressions on his mental retina; his true poetry was drawn not written--the poetry of instant act, not of laboured thought. How sensible he himself was of the difference, is shown in his clumsy lines:--

"Perception, reasoning, _action's slow ally_, Thoughts that in the mind awakened lie-- Kindly expand the monumental stone And as the ... continue power."

This is Mr. Thornbury's reading of part of the longest piece of poetry by Turner yet published, which he has printed without any care, making greater nonsense than even Turner ever wrote, which is saying a great deal. "Awakened" for instance is probably "unwakened," and "monumental stone" is probably "mental store" with another word at the commencement, the word "power" is possibly "pours," as the next line goes on, "a steady current, nor with headlong force," &c. We quite agree with Mr. W.

M. Rossetti, that these extracts are not made the best of, though it is doubtful whether the result of more careful editing would be worth the trouble.

There is no picture which better shows the greatness of Turner's power of pictorial imagination than the _Apollo and Python_. We have said that nature was almost Turner's only book. The only written book which there is evidence that he really studied--read through, probably, again and again--is Ovid's "Metamorphoses." That he was fond of poetry there is no doubt, but the sparks that lit his imagination for nearly all his best cla.s.sical compositions came from this book. This is the only poem which he really _ill.u.s.trated_, and an edition of Ovid, with engravings from all the scenes which he drew from this source, would make one of the best ill.u.s.trated books in the world. It would contain _Jason_, _Narcissus and Echo_, _Mercury and Herse_, _Apollo and Python_, _Apuleia in search of Apuleius_ (which is really the story of Appulus, who was turned into a wild olive-tree, Apuleia being a characteristic mistake of Turner's for Apulia. He is sometimes called "a shepherd of Apulia," in notes and translations, and Turner evidently took the name of the country for the name of a woman), _Apollo and the Sibyl_, _The Vision of Medea_, _The Golden Bough_, _Mercury and Argus_, _Pluto and Proserpine_, _Glaucus and Scylla_, _Pan and Syrinx_, _Ulysses and Polyphemus_. Of all these pictures and designs we have no doubt that, though he referred to other poets in the catalogues and got the idea of some part of the composition from other poets, the original germs are to be found in no other book than Ovid's "Metamorphoses." We have not exhausted the list of his debts to this poet, for it is probable that the first ideas of his Carthage pictures, and all that deal with the history of aeneas, came from the same source, a.s.sisted by references to Vergil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALLEGORY.

_From Rogers's "Voyage of Columbus."_]

Of all these, excepting the _Ulysses and Polyphemus_, there is none greater than the _Apollo and Python_. Although the figure of Apollo is not satisfactory, it gives an adequate impression of the small size of the boy-G.o.d, the radiating glory of his presence, the keen enjoyment of his struggle with the monster, and the triumph of "mind over matter." Of the landscape and the dragon it is difficult to exaggerate the grandeur of the conception; the rocks and trees convulsed with the dying struggles of the gigantic worm, the agony of the brute himself, expressed in the distorted jaws and the twisted tail, the awful dark pool of blood below, the seams in its terrible riven side, studded with a thousand little shafts from Apollo's bow, and the fragments of rock flying in the air above the griffin-like head and noisome steam of breath, make a picture without any rival of its kind in ancient or modern art. It is, as we have said, taken from two dragons of Ovid.

Turner seems to have been of the same opinion about books as about nature, and if he wanted anything to complete his picture, went on a few pages and found it. The idea of the G.o.d and his bow and arrows is taken from the account of the combat in the first book of the "Metamorphoses,"

and the idea of the huge dragon with his "poyson-paunch," comes from the same place; but the ruin of the woodland, the flying stones, and the earth blackened with the dragon's gore, come from the description of the combat of Cadmus and his dragon in the third. The larger stone is too huge indeed to be that which Cadmus flung, it has been either, as Mr.

Ruskin thinks, lashed into the air by his tail, or, as we think, torn off the rock and vomited into the air; but there is the tree, which the "serpent's weight" did make to bend, and which was "grieved his body of the serpent's tail thus scourged for to be," there is "the stinking breath that goth out from his black and h.e.l.lish mouth," there is the blood which "did die the green gra.s.s black," an idea not in Callimachus nor in Ovid's description of the Python, but which occurs both in the lines appended to the picture and in Ovid's description of Cadmus's serpent. If there were any doubt left as to the influence of this dragon on the picture, there is still another piece of evidence, viz., something very like a javelin, Cadmus's weapon, which is sticking in the dragon, and has reappeared after being painted out, so that it is possible that Turner meant the hero of the picture, in the first instance, to be Cadmus and not Apollo.

The two great dragons of Turner, that which guards the Garden of the Hesperides, and the Python, are specially interesting as the greatest efforts made by Turner's imagination in the creation of living forms, excepting, perhaps, the cloud figure of Polyphemus. They are perhaps the only monsters of the kind created by an artist's fancy, which are credible even for a moment. They will not stand a.n.a.lysis any more than any other painters' monsters, but you can enjoy the pictures without being disturbed by palpable impossibilities. The distance at which we see Ladon helps the illusion; with his fiery eyes and smoking jaws, his spiny back and terrible tail, no one could wish for a more probable reptile. The only objection that has been made to him is that his jaws are too thin and brittle, while Mr. Buskin is extravagant in his praise.

It is wonderful to him--

"This antic.i.p.ation, by Turner, of the grandest reaches of recent inquiry into the form of the dragons of the old earth ... this saurian of Turner's is very nearly an exact counterpart of the model of the iguanodon, now the guardian of the Hesperian Garden of the Crystal Palace, wings only excepted, which are, here, almost accurately, those of the pterodactyle. The instinctive grasp which a healthy imagination takes of _possible_ truth, even in its wildest flights, was never more marvellously demonstrated."

Mr. Ruskin then goes on to call attention to--

"The mighty articulations of his body, rolling in great iron waves, a cataract of coiling strength and crashing armour, down amongst the mountain rents. Fancy him moving, and the roaring of the ground under his rings; the grinding down of the rocks by his toothed whorls; the skeleton glacier of him in thunderous march, and the ashes of the hills rising round him like smoke, and encompa.s.sing him like a curtain."

The description, fine as it is, seems to us to destroy all belief in Turner's dragon. The wings of a pterodactyle would never lift the body of an iguanodon, and Turner's dragon could not even walk, his comparatively puny body could never even move his miles of tail, let alone lift them. It is far better to leave him where he is; the fact that he is at the top of that rock is sufficient evidence that he got there somehow; how he got there, and how he will get down again, are questions which we had better not ask if we wish to keep our faith in him. Nor can anything be more confused than the notion of a "saurian"

with "coiling strength and crashing armour," making the ground "roar under his rings." This might be well enough of a fabulous monster made of iron, but quite inappropriate when applied to a saurian, like the alligator, for instance, with its soft, slow movements, and its bony, skin-padded, noiseless armour.

The Python will stand still less an attempt to define in words what Turner has purposely left mysterious. Not even Mr. Ruskin, we fancy, would dare to pull him out straight from amongst his rocks and trees, and put his griffin's head and talons on to that marvellous body, half worm, half caterpillar. But he is grand, and believable as he is. More simple than either of the other monsters is the single wave of Jason's dragon in his den. This is a mere magnified coil of a simple snake; but its size, its glitter, its incompleteness, the terrible energy of it, its peculiar serpentine wiriness, that elasticity combined with stiffness which is so horrible to see and to feel, make it more awful even than the Python.

We do not believe in Turner's power to evolve even as imperfect a saurian as his Ladon out of his imagination, however "healthy;" and have no doubt that he had seen the fossil remains of an ichthyosaurus. We have the testimony of Mrs. Wheeler that he was much interested in geology,[28] and think it more than probable that the thinness of the monster's jaws and, we may add, the emptiness of his eye socket are due to his drawing them from a fossil, which his knowledge was not great enough to pad with flesh.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]